June 2026

The Strategic Absence of Silence

The notion of silence that Erling Kagge advances in Silence: In the Age of Noise edges beyond the absence of sound and closer to emptiness. “Emptiness” is a surprisingly loaded concept, in Buddhist metaphysics, for instance, but here it can just mean the absence of any sensory input (which may give rise, eventually, to the absence of any phenomena, including endogenous phenomena—a kind of mental silence). This is increasingly hard to come by. In another post, I wrote that feasting from an endless buffet of information does not amount to knowledge. This is because knowledge is not just hearing or even encoding data, but it arises from working over that data mentally, reconciling data with other facts, images, ideas, stories, and ultimately placing it within a system or narrative that itself requires updating. We have little time to do that in our society, because there is never silence, never emptiness.

Emptiness is not profitable. You can’t make money off of nothing (except maybe selling remote vacations or noise-cancelling headphones—but even then, you’re expected to do something on vacation, expected to listen to something with ads on headphones). We don’t need to just process what we hear, we need to process it all. I’m curious what the science is behind this, but I know first-personally the truth of it: past a certain threshold, all inner and outer content—words, sounds, images, ideas, sensations, memories, conversations, resultant emotions—it gets lodged in the vents of phenomenal processing.

Taking photos is a natural metaphor. For a long time I didn’t take them — reason being that, simply put, it took me out of the moment. Less simply put, I felt like my whole experience was restructured when I went from plain-perceiving to the more executive process of organizing and taking a picture. But also, it kept me from going deeper. I’d take a photo of a tree, and then I wouldn’t go back to looking at the tree. My mind would have moved on, my attention would cease organizing and encoding each layer of it, going further and further in.  

An interesting empirical question is why this happens, and also an ethics question of what’s better for the good life: preserving a place or thing (or experience, to the extent you can) by taking a photo, vs just sitting deeply with it and letting it become part of you. I honestly don't know. I really do see the value in pictures, but my view hasn't changed about the way that taking them reorients me in the moment, and almost always fails to truly capture that experience I was just removed from. I expect others feel this way (Phoebe Bridger’s latest concert tour bans phones).

This has been an aside, but it’s also an analogy for what everyday life is like. We do a lot of receiving, recording, capturing—but how much processing? Movies like the recent Backrooms are interesting, here. Liminal spaces in Backrooms show inert, dream-like places that are experienced in waking life. I feel like dreams are a kind of cleaning-the-vents of unprocessed phenomena, but today there is so much content, there’s this kind of processing that almost needs to happen in waking life, as well. We know that waking life is creeping into sleep-life (e.g. a third of adults are sleep-deprived), but what if dreaming-life is creeping into waking-life as well, as we desperately try to process all of this data. It’s another empirical question that would also require clarifying what happens while we sleep and how (if) it could play out at all while we’re conscious, what this would look like, and where we draw the boundary between the two states. But it’s interesting, with implications for psychological presence, and for agency.

I think it’s important to remember that all this content didn’t just result naturally from the technologies that were created. They are pumped into our airwaves constantly for profit, given the total absence of any regulation or democratic discussion of how to limit the influx of information, images, etc. We limit the flow of all kinds of things: drugs, currencies, porn, exotic animals, weapons. Why do we not fight harder to limit the flow of content? It’s just there, in bottomless volumes, for us to consume, clogging the vents, burying us, dividing us.

We need silence, or emptiness, to recover emotionally, to achieve deeper knowledge, and most importantly, to step back and look at how we got to this place to begin with, and what we want to change. Capitalism drives the flow of information because it is profitable to do so, but this flow also functions to keep our attention trained, so that we lose the vitality and the perspective to mount a meaningful challenge to the system. We need a publicly organized campaign to institute technological norms and limitations, not just for teens, but for all of us.

AI Pessimism

The majority of people think AI is advancing too quickly and believe it will have a negative impact on their lives. Why is this? Are we luddites afraid of a new technology that (A) makes us feel useless and (B) deprives us of an income or (C) recruits us in committing moral crimes. Let’s look at all three.

I personally think AI pessimism has (or should have) less to do with AI threatening what it means to be human by outperforming humans. I don’t completely reject Bezos’ attitude that if you’re a programmer (or engineer or game designer or teacher) and AI can now do a lot of what you used to do, your time is freed up to do other things: advance your research, expand the scope of your projects, restructure your curriculum or classroom, etc. Learning to do so will in some cases be aided by AI. Just because a lawyer now uses AI to build a case, doesn’t mean we’ll just stop having lawyers. It means lawyers can get better at their jobs.

AI will cause some jobs to vanish, but many such activities themselves will survive as rewarding hobbies or passions. People choose to garden even though they can buy vegetables from the grocery store. Every year people hike to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood (where a road also leads). We do things because we like to, not always because machines can’t do them or because they’re socially needed. We also don’t lose the desire to do things just because a machine does it better. If AI can write great novels, that’s not wildly different to me than the fact that there are many human authors who write more compelling stories than I do. It means machines have joined the competition and the “community” of writers, in a weird way. The best chess engines are unbeatable by grandmasters. People still play chess.

Yes, it’s nice to be best, or even the only. Yes, it’s nice to have society value the things we’re good at. But at the end of the day, just do what you like to do, even if AI can do it as well.

There is, secondly, a rational fear that AI will create an employment crisis, but this is more an issue with capitalism than AI. AI should remove the need to do things we hate doing, and we should allow for shorter work weeks without a dip in standards-of-living. If staving-off unemployment was the only reason to halt AI progress, then the more urgent matter would be restructuring society so automation didn’t create a permanent underclass of unemployables.

In both cases, would we really feel better keeping our jobs only in virtue of the fact that we stopped this technology, knowing full-well that it could have replaced us (and even outperformed us) if we let it? I suspect not, especially if it came with the added cost of depriving the world of an otherwise useful (potentially tremendously useful) technology.

A third reason for AI pessimism is a problem familiar to all consumption under global capitalism, and that’s the blood on our hands whenever we consume anything that wasn’t made with ingredients harvested in our backyard. Related, there’s the rational fear AI will escalate environmental and climate catastrophe. This is, again, not a problem with AI itself, it's an issue with the social and environmental context we live in, one with lax regulations globally (on labor and the environment) and an insatiable appetite for capital accumulation.

There is, however, a fourth reason for AI pessimism that I think is harder to overcome by changing contingent features: social, environmental, economic. I think what makes AI unsettling to use is the fact that most of us just don’t understand it. Not even close. It might as well be an alien technology. With a typewriter, I can see how it works. With an air plane, I could learn how it works. An old-school telephone—I can almost barely wrap my mind conceptually around how it’s working, but with AI it's just out of reach for many people. Even those at the center of this project confront opacity with how AI completes cognitive tasks, with the so-called "Interpretability Problem" of AI. Consider this quote from CEO of anthropic Dario Amodei: "People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work ... When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does."

If interpretability is solved, and if public education on AI is such that many come to understand conceptually how it works (if not technically), I suspect it will continue to seem alien. It’s just so disconnected from the physical world. Maybe, in a way, technology has been like this for awhile. Radio waves are also disconnected from the material plane, and radios have been around since the 1890s. I think where the difference lies, however, is that radios and televisions, and even computers for awhile, transmitted human activity (or activity captured by humans) to other humans. AI chatbots (Gemini, ChatGPT) strongly appear to generate their own content: images, music, conversations, etc. even if it’s (in a sense) just scraping and recombining content from the internet. (A philosophical problem then becomes how exactly this is different, and if it’s deeply different, from what humans do. I think it is, but that’s beyond this short article).

We have good reason to not trust alien technologies, because they’re either autonomous, in which case definitionally we can’t trust them, or they’re run by humans who, almost certainly, jealously guard and wish to expand their wealth and power. We just cannot trust that what we type into a chatbot is not being tracked, stored, studied, and deployed for the self-interest of those who own the platforms — deployed across a vast scale with intentions mundane to malevolent.

AI is an alien technology, and for that it’s alienating to use. Yet, it somehow feels worse (to me) when it mimics humans—so called “attachment hacking.” We know it’s not a human, but part of us responds as if it is. We’re like lonely kids talking to stuffies. As kids age, their imaginations struggle to make their stuffed animals real. We’re on the other end of that arc, and it’s given rise to a new kind of psychosis (see previous link).

The essential non-humanness of anthropomorphic AI relates to why its art feels weird to look at. Art comes from a process that is deeply human, or at least close-nit with complex conscious states. It’s an intriguing aesthetics question whether the art-product is separable from the process itself:  inspiration, execution, revision, preceded maybe by all the “phenomenal processing” discussed in the previous article. This is categorically not what’s happening when AI produces art. Now, of course, this may not make a difference to the experiencer (if they can’t tell the difference). But when you learn an image is AI, I think the difference enters when we know that three-step process does not constitute the product. When we see the art, we feel the process. It lands with us. Likewise, a turquoise pool in the desert is beautiful until you learn the color is the result of dye, or toxins. All perception is theory-laden. We see things as what we know them to be, as the philosopher Ned Block has argued extensively. And the theory of art is not the blind thrummings of an LLM, but rather struggle, expression, creations, catharsis, connection.